Nia Vardalos: ‘Nobody at the End of Their Life Is Going to Say, “I Wish I Worked More”’
Nia Vardalos wants her daughter to have as normal a life as possible. (Photo: Robin Marchant/Getty Images)
Nia Vardalos knows the importance of family — and we’re not just talking about her big fat Greek one.
It took 14 years for Vardalos to finally break out the Windex and deliver a My Big Fat Greek Wedding sequel because the Oscar-nominated actress and screenwriter was struggling to build a family of her own.
“I didn’t have a clue of where I could take the story because I’d written that my character was a parent and I myself was in a private struggle to become a mom,” Vardalos, 53, told Yahoo Celebrity. “I really put the idea of doing a sequel out of my mind. I closed that door.”
The independent film, first released in 2002, was an instant success. Fans found it difficult to separate “Nia Vardalos” from her character, “Toula Portokalos.” She was approached immediately to draft a sequel, but Vardalos quietly declined.
Instead, she gave her full attention to her pursuit of motherhood.
Years of in vitro fertilization treatments and numerous failed adoption attempts later, Vardalos was finally matched with a 3-year-old girl through the California foster care system in 2008. Vardalos and husband Ian Gomez were given just 14 hours notice before they brought little Ilaria, now 11, home.
Vardalos and hubby Ian Gomez. (Photo: Instagram)
In an instant, Vardalos’s focus was suddenly far away from the Portokalos family and entirely on her own family with Gomez. She happily retreated from her public life.
“When I became a mom, I decided that I can still work by writing, so I took myself off camera,” the actress explained. “I just think it’s important for kids to have as normal of a life as possible.”
But after nearly six years living life out of the spotlight, inspiration for a sequel struck at an unexpected time.
“On my daughter’s first day of kindergarten, somebody said something about how quickly they would leave us and go off to college, and that’s when I got the idea for the sequel,” Vardalos shared. “I thought, ‘That’s it! That’s it! I never want my daughter to leave me!’”
So she got to writing. It took her four years to finalize the script — but only a few minutes for word to spread to her My Big Fat Greek Wedding cast members.
“I only had to make three phone calls because I called John Corbett first and then, by the time I started making the calls to the [rest of the] cast, they had all started calling each other!” she laughed.
Vardalos understands that the return of the Portokalos family and their Parthenon-inspired home was a long-awaited moment, but she doesn’t regret putting the sequel on the back burner for more than a decade.
“We’re not supposed to rush it,” she said. “It’s balance. Nobody at the end of their life is going to say, ‘I wish I worked more.’ [My daughter] is the light of my life, and I don’t want to miss anything.”
But once Vardalos made her decision to step back onto the red carpet, she had to figure out a way to combine her two worlds without compromising her happiness — or the happiness of her daughter.
Her solution? Have her real family join her onscreen with her film family.
Just take a closer look at the background actors in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, now available on Blu-ray and DVD.
“In the church scene, that’s mostly my family in the pews,” Vardalos revealed. “And the line that goes around and dances through the wedding reception is my sisters, my brother, my parents, and all my cousins. Film lives forever, which is why I make my family come and be in my movies.”
Vardalos and her real-life big fat Greek family. (Photo: Courtesy Nia Vardalos)
After years of feeling the pressure to choose one over the other, it’s safe to say Vardalos has finally struck the perfect balance between the Big Fat Greek family she worked so hard to create and the private family life she’s always wanted.
(And yes, her father actually does use Windex for everything in real life.)
“Opa!” to that.
